Steve Sando is busy, but still cooking

Fans of Rancho Gordo know that Steve Sando, the bean evangelist who started the company, knows a thing or two about those humble legumes. Even though the pandemic means that he’s working long hours six days a week, he shared a week’s worth of his cooking at home for Grub Street. While it is no surprise that beans feature prominently, we learn that Sando enjoys plenty of other fantastic foods as well.

I haven’t shared many of these ‘Grub Street diet’ articles because frequently they are flat out boring. But Sando’s meals, along with his fascinating descriptions, intrigued me enough that I thought our Members would also enjoy reading about them. Sando admits that he has only been to a traditional supermarket once since stay-at-home orders were issued, but when you have unlimited access to beans along with a lovely CSA (community supported agriculture) box, you have little need for a regular grocery store.

Sando’s genuine love of food comes out in the way he describes what he has been eating, like the cornbread he recently made: “If the pan is hot enough when the batter hits, it forms a crust that’s not very deep but is almost like when you eat cheese and it has that crystalline thing going. It’s the most subtle, sublime crunch-to-cornbread ratio. The only problem with this cornbread is it doesn’t keep. And the other problem is deciding what the word portion means.”

Although he gushes about many of the foods he makes, he doesn’t praise everything. Kale is not high on his list of preferred greens and when he received a bunch in his CSA box he used it almost grudgingly: “I prefer dandelion greens, chard, or rapini to kale but with enough pancetta, anything is delicious,” he says. “With kale, it’s a sort of penance — it feels like you’re doing your duty.”